Monday, November 5, 2012

Building Our Town

Day One

This month we will be creating an imaginary town. We began with an empty plot of grass and a group of citizens who wanted us to turn it into a town. We brainstormed about all the things a town would need. The first thing they added was a playground :) We had great conversations about all the things we needed. The children mentioned that we would need money. When I asked "where do people get money?" The two responses were "the store" and "work." Which resulted in them adding three stores for places to work. A food store, a clothing store (for bathing suits for the pool) and a treat store. Later when we were reading a book (featured below), we realized that we needed to have a trash truck and place for it to bring the trash. I suggested a Town Office for us to hold our meetings in. No matter how much more I questioned and encouraged them, they ran out of ideas to add to our map.

This is my artistic talent, not that of the children. Theirs would probably put mine to shame.

We used the construction vehicles to build roads, bridges, and ramps.

DAY TWO

On day two we added a few more places to our town. We added a train station, which meant we also needed to add tracks. We added a fence around the pool and discussed who could work at the pool to keep people safe. We added pear trees to the apple orchard. A parking lot at the top of the map for all the construction trucks to park in.

It started in complete chaos.

Soon I realized they needed to have "foundations" to build on.

When they got tired of building a couple of the "workers" went back to the office to draw up some blueprints. We haven't used rulers much at preschool in the recent past, so this was a very fascinating activity for them.

DAY THREEThe kids suggested that we add a fire station and police station to the map. We talked about how important those are and what would have happened in the town without them. We voted to hire 6 fireman total. Three that work at night and three that work during the day. We also decided that we would start with three policemen.